Edward J. McCluskey, a professor emeritus at Stanford whose research helped pave the way for electronics and computing, died on Feb. 13. He was 86.
Born on the eve of the Great Depression, McCluskey graduated from Bowdoin College in Maine in 1953, earning honors in mathematics and physics, then went on to study electrical engineering at MIT, where he earned his doctorate in 1956. But the experience that set him on the path toward professional greatness occurred during the period from 1955 through 1959, when he worked first as an MIT intern and later as a staff researcher at Bell Telephone Laboratories during its heyday.
In a 2008 lecture, when he won an award from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), McCluskey fondly recalled that storied period when Bell researchers were inventing many of the building blocks of electronics and computing. It was in this intellectual crucible that McCluskey helped devise a way to efficiently and unerringly design logic chips...
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